


the sea is a good place to think of the future

by vanillarouge



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Eating Disorders, Gen, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Purple Prose, Rose-Centric, S-Sort of.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-15
Updated: 2013-01-15
Packaged: 2017-11-25 14:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillarouge/pseuds/vanillarouge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Easier said than done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sea is a good place to think of the future

**Author's Note:**

> A sort of backstory thing i wrote for my
> 
>  
> 
> [roleplay blog](rosellelalonde.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> u____u
> 
> Since I joined a timeline which had been without a rose for a long time I had to come up with an explanation of why rose had been absent, and a susan-pevensie-sort-of post-traumatic denial was what i found more interesting to explore.

Your first thought after waking up in your old Rainbow Falls house is that everything’s dusty.

So dusty. Even you are.

You lay on the floor for two days on end and let the sunlight bathe what used to be your living room, cold and grey when it travels back and forth from the picture windows to the walls; feel the sound of rushing water beneath your body.

A forgotten intuition, maybe lost somewhere in the back of your mind,  tells you it should probably strike you as comforting, familiar. Instead it becomes nothing but strange background static; foreign whispers, alien cacophony, allergic reactions.

You roll your head to the side and press your cheek against the cold hardwood, and don’t remember anything except that you’re sad, and you’re lost, and you’re small.

;;

Your full name is Roselle Madeline Lalonde III and you look and act and pretend and live your life like you’re a princess from the fairytales.

You smile your thousand dollar smile and the nicest, friendliest, most caring family takes you in, a foster home is not a place for a girl of your caliber; he is a doctor and she stays at home and takes care of her house like she lives to make June Cleaver proud, just married thirty-something couple, honeymoon phase, live in an upper-class cookie-cutter suburb and are wealthy enough, sincere enough not to even blink when the social worker eyes you sideways, bargains like you’re a cursed property she’s dying to get rid of, whispers to them of the preposterous amounts of money your mother left on her will for you.

He wears a tacky apron when he grills barbecue burgers in the backyard if it’s sunny, Kiss the Cook in big bold letters; buys you golden octopus earrings and takes you to the aquarium the moment you start showing an interest in Cephalopods. Humorously plays the intimidating father role when he finds out that the boy next door likes to smile at you through the coinciding windows of your bedrooms, that he writes you messages like _good morning, gorgeous_ and  _I thought of you all day_ in loose leaf paper that you coyly read but never answer.

She wraps pearls heavy with sentimental value and even heavier with market price around your neck, dabs a brush in lustrous white powder and teaches you to paint your face when you turn fourteen, your reflection still so still in the glass of her boudoir. She takes you out shopping and makes feasts for dinner on Wednesday nights; listens to you when you tell her about this friend you made at school, and this song you listened to, and this brilliant grade you got in your last test; when you tell her about the boy next door who isn’t blonde and isn’t brunette and whose name isn’t four letters long.

They take you to Church on Sundays and encourage you to follow your dreams, adopt a kitten from the shelter when you ask them to, and never press you to address them other than by their names;

they are so fucking stupid that they never notice how off, off  you are.

;;

Because they know but they don’t _know_ that you were found in your own house a week after being reported missing, that they found you thin and dirty and pallid and starved and limping and ravenous,

cleaning and washing and scrubbing and bleaching and polishing and sweeping and mopping and dusting because everything (everything) was just so

_fucking_

dirty—

That your mother’s corpse was rotting upstairs, that the smell reached the neighbours; that you drew a pentagram around her, lit scented candles and filled the room with flowers, with glasses of vodka;

wrote words on the walls of her room in languages everyone was horrorized of but no one could identify, made drawings on the walls that the police officers cried about but could never explain why.

;;

You get accepted into the Department of Psychology at Stanford on your first try because you’re oh-so-brilliant, get a car as a goodbye gift and move to the heart of Northern California to become the envy of all the girls in town.

You smile your thousand dollar smile and the admission office melts, you’re one of the bestests students of your generation; stellar grades, astronomical test scores, pages of extracurricular activities, glowing teacher recommendations, essays that make professors cry. They say you love to learn for the sake of learning, that you genuinely enjoy what you do, that you’re an independent thinker; creative, passionate, risk-taking, charismatic, energetic; the whole real deal.

You make friends with all the right people and join the most exclusive clubs and play all the classic sports and, on your free time, you write poems, write plays, write movies and a book then a trilogy that never gets published.

;;

But you played a game that brought the end of the world and you remember nothing except your mother’s dead dead _dead_ body, remember doing nothing except watching and waiting and watching once again because you were

(you are)

you were

so

so weak.

;;

Sometimes you dream of glow-in-the-dark skin, of soft curves and black hair, long and short, human and not; wake up after the memories have done nothing but fade into the dream of a dream of a caress, lost and forgotten somewhere between your morning tea with two three four friends and the murmur of their incessant gossiping.

And so you nod and smile and pretend to listen to arguments you’ve tricked yourself into pretending you care about, white noise in your mind when you’re alone, autopilot responses when you’re in company, days that blend into each other endlessly except for midterms and five six seven dates you accept because refusing seems to need an elaborate explanation you don’t care enough to come up with; the occasional social event you attend dressed in the light white dress you only bought because everyone liked how it fit you when you tried it on.

And it feels like you’ve been doing this for a million years, for ages; it feels like a too-long novel, like an old photography, like still life, like you spend every days doing the same things over and over again. You wake up and dress up and have brunch with your so called friends, shuffle through eight nine ten classes and spend the evening participating in extracurricular activities, writing eleven twelve thirteen papers which by the end of the day leave you exhausted, except your body is on autopilot and you find yourself in somebody’s house with people you know but whose names you can’t remember, laughing at somebody’s joke, singing along somebody’s song, smiling somebody’s smile.

;;

He tells you he loves you in the sense of kissing and holding hands, misery and tears and all.

Somewhere inside your heart, or at least, the basic place where you know it should be if you hadn’t sold it for socialite clubs and hypocrite tea parties, you know he tells you nothing but the truth. He has honest eyes that are nothing but a warm deep brown, and you want nothing but to feel the heat; to feel like they have built a heart inside your stomach and lit it in fire.

Instead there is nothing but the faint feeling of being cold; you forgot your jacket at home and your knees are knocking each other with all this unstoppable shivering.

Everyone around you is cheering and smiling and looking at you, and the girls take pictures with their neon-coloured phones, whisper of romanticism, of perfection and happy endings meant only for princesses from the fairytales, so you say yes and become that princess, being kissed in the rain and called beautiful and flawless and special, the one whose books are always carried, who walks over puddles on coat bridges, doors always opened and space always respected, out of a 90s teenage dream;

mute perfect trophy girlfriend, nothing but a pretty face and a pretty mind and so she stops eating, and slowly morphs into a paper doll.

;;

And you look into the mirror and all you can see is _fat_ hanging from your bones, showing people how you are never in control, and then you cry and scream and you run a mile a day on nothing but water and a cup of cereal and scrub the floor until your fingernails bleed and pluck the wings of seven dozen flies; your hair thins, your eyes dim, your bones feel like glass and your skin like sandpaper and you haven’t slept in a day maybe two or were those three but you’re still not. Skinny. Enough.

;;

It ends with a bang and a whimper.

A world with soft edges and blurred shadows  shattering with your hands around the neck of somebody you know but whose name you can’t remember.

;;

Rose used to be someone strong like sea tides and nuclear explosions, beautiful on the edges and deadly gut-deep inside.

You’re not.

Maybe it’s tragically beautiful.

Beautifully tragic.

;;

You localize two boys on the internet, blond and brunet with four-letters long names, and drive a hundred miles then fly the rest of the way to meet them.

The sky is blue that day, and they welcome you with open arms and a room of your own and warm coffee in the morning, the brightest smiles you can remember ever seeing.

Dave says, “we missed you, Rose,” letting his smile turn into a reassuring grin, and you pull him close and wrap your arms around him and try to twist his words into a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> [whispers tumblr mirror](http://missvanillamilkshake.tumblr.com/post/40566213300/the-sea-is-a-good-place-to-think-of-the-future)


End file.
